This paper places the work of a Peruvian NGO, with which the author collaborates, within a broad context of the theory of knowledge. The three members of PRATEC were engaged in different aspects of the development enterprise. Out of their perceived failure of that enterprise, they deprofessionalised themselves and founded this NGO. The author argues that within the professional academic disciplines it is impossible to produce a knowledge that can contribute to the procreative concerns of communities, that is, their concerns (...) about their continuity and well-being. She does a brief historical review of the emergence of the modern University in the nineteenth century and the hidden political agenda of the new so called value- free knowledge it institutionalised. She ends up advocating a rejection of the double participation necessitated by professional academic disciplines. (shrink)

This article provides a summary of current knowledge about memory illusions. The memory illusions described here focus on the recall of imagined events that have never actually occurred. The purpose is to review theoretical ideas and empirical evidence about the reality-monitoring processes involved in memory illusions. Reality monitoring means deciding whether the memory has been perceptually derived or been self-generated (thought or imagined). A few key findings from the literature have been reported in this paper and these focus on internal (...) source-monitoring judgments which distinguish perceptual events from imagined events. Finally, the experimental paradigms used to shed light on processes occurring in the failure of reality monitoring in healthy subjects may be extended to an examination of the causes and the prevention of hallucinations in patients. (shrink)

Cette toute première édition critique de la version arabo-latine de la _Rhétorique_ d’Aristote réalisée par Hermann l’Allemand est accompagnée d’une étude complète de la tradition latine du texte, et présente les principes d’édition adoptés ici, qui prennent en compte la version arabe de la _Rhétorique_. This is the first critical edition of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ in its Arabo-Latin translation made by Hermann the German. It contains a full study of the latin tradition of the text, as well as the principles used (...) in the edition, which takes account of the Arabic version of the _Rhetoric_. (shrink)

The book falls into three parts each of which focuses on one author and the ways in which pluralism manifests itself in his particular genre.

Although developmental biology is an institutionalized discipline, no unambiguous account of what development is and when it stops has so far been provided. In this article, I focus on two sets of developmental molecular mechanisms, namely those underlying the heterochronic pathway in C. elegans and those involving Hox genes in vertebrates, to suggest a conceptual account of animal development. I point out that, in these animals, the early stages of life exhibit salient mechanistic features, in particular in the way mechanisms (...) of genetic regulation occur in the organism. Indeed, these stages are characterized by sequential and irreversible changes in gene expression taking place throughout the organism. A general definition of animal development based on these distinctive features implies that, at least for some animal species, development does not go on throughout the life of the animal, contrary to what has recently been claimed by some biologists and philosophers. Instead, in such species, development encompasses various events occurring sequentially at the beginning of life. (shrink)

Nous comparons les notions d’usage et de signification chez Ludwig Wittgenstein et Martin Heidegger. Contrairement à Jocelyn Benoist, nous pensons que l’analogie entre Wittgenstein et Heidegger n’est pas superficielle. La métaphysique de Heidegger explicite certaines présuppositions implicites de la seconde philosophie de Wittgenstein. Le pragmatisme naturaliste de Wittgenstein peut être théorisé. Notamment la notion wittgensteinienne d’usage, ou de jeu de langage, peut être comprise comme une pratique à la fois naturelle et normative régie par des règles. -/- Wittgenstein’s notions of (...) use and meaning are compared with the corresponding Heidegger’s ones. Unlike Jocelyn Benoist, we suggest that the analogy between Wittgenstein and Heidegger is not superficial. Heidegger’s metaphysics makes explicit some of the implicit presuppositions of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Wittgenstein’s naturalistic pragmatism can be theorized. In particular, Wittgenstein’s notion of use, or language game, can be understood as both natural and normative rule- governing practice. (shrink)

This book is a reconsideration of spirituality as a lived experience in the lives of the contributors. The authors speak both as well-informed scholars and as individuals who experienced the lived spirituality they give voice to. The authors do not place themselves above and outside of what they are writing about but within that world. They speak of living psychospiritual traditions of healing both the self and the world; of traditions that have not disembedded the self from the wider world. (...) Those traditions are from indigenous North and South America (5 essays), a Buddhist/ Shakta from Bengal, an Indo-Persian Islamic psychoanalyst, a mystical Jewish feminist rabbi, and a historical essay about the extermination of the Renaissance worldview of Anima Mundi. (shrink)

The Marx of Communism and the Marx of Structuralism. The article addresses the issue of the response within the French Communist Party to the structuralist and anti-humanist reading of Marx which Althusser formulated in the period leading up to May 1968. While structuralism was regarded by some as a marker of the avant-garde, to a number of communist intellectuals, and in particular those closest to the party leadership, it amounted to a “a philosophy of hopelessness”. e article thus examines the (...) context in which Althusser was declared to be heterodox in the early months of 1966, in particular at the convention of philosophers held in Choisy and at the meeting of the Communist Party central committee in Argenteuil. (shrink)

Theories of embodied cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear how to understand them. We offer several interpretations of embodiment, the most interesting being the thesis that mental representations in bodily formats (B-formats) have an important role in cognition. Potential B-formats include motoric, somatosensory, affective and interoceptive formats. The literature on mirroring and related phenomena provides support for a limited-scope version of embodied social cognition under the B-format interpretation. It is questionable, however, whether such a thesis can (...) be extended. We show the limits of embodiment in social cognition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comme Elle Respire:Memory of Breath, Breath of MemoryFrédérique Berthet (bio)Translated by David F. Bell (bio)La poésie est un système de respiration, c'est fait pour mieux respirer.[Poetry is a respiration system, it's made for breathing better.]—Erri De Luca- Stop!- What?- I can hear you breathing!...- Stop!- Breathing?- Yes!—Paul Thomas AndersonLittle paper-fish cutouts have been placed on the ground, on the carpet.We're in the reassuring '70s stylishness of a doctor's office. (...) The carpet is soft and glistens like in interior decoration magazines, it's with it, in. We couldn't care less about what Dyson vacuum cleaners and "purifiers" boast they can eliminate several decades later: acarids, those microscopic domestic arthropods, human parasites (notably), and airborne vectors of infectious disease (colds, coughs, respiratory distress). No, in the spring of 1975, innocently and self-satisfyingly, the urbane doctor flaunts the opulent carpet with curly pile in his luxury apartment with its state-of-the-art waiting room.In this grand interior of a medical office, a man in a white coat plies his important trade. For example, that day a little girl is re-learning how to breathe. One might think that exhaling and inhaling is learned for life—je t'aime comme je respire, elle parle comme elle respire, il ment comme il respire1—from the very first cry at birth. But in fact, sometimes in life breathing gets stuck between the nasal cavity and the bronchial tubes, between the respiratory tract and the lungs. Progressively, imperceptibly, the organism is short of air, a malicious infection spreads and impairs [End Page 92] alveolar diffusion to the point of respiratory exhaustion: Is it serious, doctor? We must act quickly, very quickly. How to liquify what stopped up the system one day to the point of blocking it—the doctors know what to do.This doctor undertook long, arduous and learned studies. He knows functionally how a living being breathes, how a child lives organically. He can also re-teach the little girl what she no longer knows how to do: inhale, exhale using the full volume of the thoracic cage, regulating the ventilatory flow, solidifying the invisible membranes. In the child's family, everyone knows (and knows how to do) important things, but no one undertook extensive studies, much less studies of the aerial exchanges in the human body. This special knowledge possessed by the doctor (unless special means something else unspoken that would explain why this specific doctor was chosen rather than any other) surrounds him with a padding of respect that creates (and the little girl feels this) a sort of protective continuum between him and the walls within which he sees her, where he practices his kind of calm and slow urbane medicine. It's far from the formidable hospital she has just left, with its spherical apparatus next to the bed aspirating the red and yellow pleural liquid, the "treatment room" where the surgeon, the "butcher" as the nurses call him among themselves, manipulated the drain without anesthesia, with no regard for the child's suffering. The doctor, and his place in the elevated tower, even though they are not to be confused, make for a cozy reception space in which one is comfortable, even in passing.This doctor—who is, in truth, a massage-physiotherapist—is located in a designer high-rise building with a façade decorated by white, pointed features that manifest a will toward an architectural act. On the ground floor, the entrance hall is finished in dark-veined, clear brown marble, and the entry threshold between the exterior and interior is marked by large transparent glass panes that must be manipulated with care. The entrance hall has an intimidating sonority and a useless cold nudity from which one escapes in an elevator where one is surrounded by mirrors and gold buttons and in which one speeds upward silently toward floors, clouds.The designer high-rise is located at the outskirts, the outskirts of a city of recent Olympic stature, where several years earlier Olympic athletes were welcomed and trained to increase their respiratory capacity and... (shrink)

In this paper I build a case for considering the pioneering behaviourist philosopher Grace de Laguna as one of the grandmothers of analytic philosophy. I argue against the ‘Great Men’ narrative of analytic philosophy as composed of Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein and their followers, and in favour of a more inclusive ‘movement’ narrative of analytic philosophy as a broad and varied movement with an anti-idealist and naturalistic orientation aimed at fitting around novel development in the sciences, including Einsteinian physics and psychology. (...) I compare de Laguna’s prescient early views to Whitehead’s; both share an anti-idealist but also anti-atomist solution to the problem of perception, and both oppose the bifurcation of nature, with de Laguna expressing these views before Whitehead did. I conclude that while both opposed the narrower project of logical atomism, both count as ancestors of the wider analytic movement. (shrink)

W.V. Quine, a champion of philosophical naturalism and pioneer of mathematical logic, was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. This volume provides a full picture of the development of Quine's views on structure and how it permeates and shapes his attitude to a range of philosophical questions.

We argue that Lewis would have rejected recent appeals to the notions of ‘metaphysical dependency’, ‘grounding’ and ‘ontological priority’, because he would have held that they’re not needed and they’re not intelligible. We argue our case by drawing upon Lewis’s views on supervenience, the metaphysics of singletons and the dubiousness of Kripke’s essentialism.

A new model of bioturbation has been developed to describe short term sediment reworking induced by macrobenthic communities. The design of the model had to consider the mixing processes, firstly, at the organism level, and secondly, at community level. This paper describes the mixing mode of the four types of bioturbators defined by the authors: the biodiffusors, the upward-conveyors, the downward-conveyors and the regenerators. The mathematical formulation of these sub-models consists of ordinary differential equations. They take into account the size (...) of the bioturbated zone, the output fluxes to the water column, tracer decay, physical mixing due to local currents and the type and intensity of the bioturbation processes. These sub-models make it possible to describe correctly the mixing events that have occurred in cores with each type of bioturbator. They also provide the basis for general bioturbation model, that will take into account the respective degrees of involvement of (i) the different bioturbation processes and their characteristics, (ii) the interference between the different processes, and (iii) make possible to predict the particle reworking in order to include it in studies of organic matter in early diagenesis. (shrink)

An odd dissensus between confident metaphysicians and neopragmatist antimetaphysicians pervades early twenty-first century analytic philosophy. Each faction is convinced their side has won the day, but both are mistaken about the philosophical legacy of the twentieth century. More historical awareness is needed to overcome the current dissensus. Lewis and his possible-world system are lionised by metaphysicians; Quine’s pragmatist scruples about heavy-duty metaphysics inspire antimetaphysicians. But Lewis developed his system under the influence of his teacher Quine, inheriting from him his empiricism, (...) his physicalism, his metaontology, and, I will show in this paper, also his Humeanism. Using published as well as never-before-seen unpublished sources, I will make apparent that both heavy-duty metaphysicians and neopragmatist antimetaphysicians are wrong about the roles Quine and Lewis played in the development of twentieth-century philosophy. The two are much more alike than is commonly supposed, and Quine much more instrumental to the pedigree of current metaphysics. (shrink)

The present discussion derives from a larger research project that concerns the medieval Latin translation of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. The translation was carried out by Hermann the German in Toledo in 1240. I am concerned here specifically with nine passages that are distributed over three chapters of the Commentary in which the Latin translation is sprinkled with transliterations based on Greek and Arabic terms. These transliterations, which are not glosses, can be understood on several levels, and (...) these, in turn, raise questions about the boundary between transliteration proper and translation that borrows from the source language a term which is then integrated into the Latin lexicon in the form of a calque or ‘loan translation’. Examining these transliterations makes it possible, first, to show that the translator does not follow a uniform method throughout the text, which could imply the existence of several translators or several collaborators with disti... (shrink)

When one contrasts pain with the classic five senses, discussions generally focus on vision, which is taken as the paradigmatic example of perception. An intentionalist might argue that if the phenomenal difference between feeling and seeing bodily disturbances cannot be explained at the level of the content, it can be so at the level of the mode of presentation, and more particularly at the level of the structure of the spatial phenomenology of pain. Here I will argue that the spatial (...) phenomenology of pain shares some key features with touch by contrast to sight, but these similarities should not make us neglect major differences between these two types of bodily sensations. I shall then draw the consequences of these differences for the awareness of one’s body as one’s own. In brief, to fix the boundaries of the body that one experiences as one’s own, one must answer two questions: where does the body stop, and the rest of world start? and what matters for self-preservation? I will suggest that touch primarily answers the first question, whereas pain primarily answers the second question. (shrink)

In 2022, an estimated 110,000 people died of an opioid-related drug overdose in the United States (Ahmad et al. 2024) primarily related to illicit fentanyl. However, fatal overdoses comprise only a...

En partie issu d’un colloque sur les « Effets de voix : la voix et les voix dans la pensée et la littérature romaines » qui s’est tenu en novembre 2014 à Lille, ce livre rassemble dix-huit contributions, classées selon quatre grandes catégories : I. Philosophie, II. Rhétorique et médecine, III. Acoustique, théâtre et littérature, IV. Linguistique, anthropologie, religion. Il comprend également une bibliographie (p. 385-423), un index des noms (p. 425-429), un index des passages cités (p. 431-...

Les présentes remarques se proposent d’observer la façon dont les noms propres ont été traités par Averroès dans son Commentaire moyen à l’Éthique à Nicomaque, rédigé à partir de la traduction arabe du traité aristotélicien, dont une seule copie unique existe aujourd’hui, conservée dans la bibliothèque Quaraouiyine de Fès. Perdu dans sa version originale arabe, ce Commentaire n’existe – à l’exception d’une trentaine de petits fragments – que dans sa traduction latine, réalisée en 1240 par Hermann l’Allemand, et dans sa (...) traduction hébraïque, achevée par Samuel de Marseille en 1340. Analyser l’attitude d’Averroès devant les noms propres de ENar, qui pour la plupart ont été translittérés par le traducteur arabe, entraîne par voie de conséquence un examen de la façon dont Hermann et Samuel ont à leur tour réagi face à des noms propres, dont ils ne connaissaient pas nécessairement les référents puisqu’ils appartiennent à une aire c... (shrink)

This is the first critical edition of Book X of the Latin version of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s _Nicomachean Ethics_. The text is accompanied by a French translation and explanatory notes, and is preceded by a study of the manuscript tradition and two studies on the Commentary itself. Cette première édition critique de la version latine du Commentaire d’Averroès à l’_Éthique à Nicomaque_, accompagnée d’une traduction française annotée, est précédée de l’examen de la tradition manuscrite du texte et de (...) deux études consacrée à ce Commentaire. (shrink)

In this paper, we attempt to make a distinction between egocentrism and allocentrism in social cognition, based on the distinction that is made in visuo-spatial perception. We propose that it makes a difference to mentalizing whether the other person can be understood using an egocentric (‘‘you'') or an allocentric (‘‘he/ she/they'') stance. Within an egocentric stance, the other person is represented in relation to the self. By contrast, within an allocentric stance, the existence or mental state of the other person (...) needs to be represented as independent from the self. We suggest here that people with Asperger syndrome suffer from a disconnection between a strong naı¨ve egocentric stance and a highly abstract allocentric stance. We argue that the currently used distinction between first-person and third-person perspective-taking is orthogonal to the distinction between an egocentric and an allocentric stance and therefore cannot serve as a critical test of allocentrism. (shrink)

In ‘Putnam’s Paradox’, Lewis defended global descriptivism and reference magnetism. According to Schwarz [2014], Lewis didn’t mean what he said there, and really held neither position. We present evidence from Lewis’s correspondence and publications which shows conclusively that Lewis endorsed both.

The philosophical world is indebted to Alvin Goldman for a number of reasons, and among them, his defense of the relevance of cognitive science for philosophy of mind. In Simulating minds, Goldman discusses with great care and subtlety a wide variety of experimental results related to mindreading from cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology and developmental psychology. No philosopher has done more to display the resourcefulness of mental simulation. I am sympathetic with much of the general direction of Goldman’s theory. (...) I agree with him that mindreading is not a single system based on a single mechanism. And I admire his attempt to bring together the cognitive neuroscientific discovery of mirror system phenomena and the philosophical account of pretense within a unique theoretical framework of mental simulation. To do so, Goldman distinguishes two types of mindreading, respectively, based on low-level and high-level simulation. Yet, I wonder in what sense they are really two distinct processes. Here, I will confine myself largely to spelling out a series of points that take issue with the distinction between low-level and high-level mindreading. (shrink)

If the professionalization of the social professions is increasingly based on the model of professionalization engineering, what are the imaginaries underlying this movement? How can we understand that the profession of engineer, the one who, at least in the imagination, invents and designs machines with a magically predictable functioning, can be the model for designing training systems for the helping professions? This contribution proposes to explore these questions through two mythological figures often summoned when it comes to engineering and technology (...) : Prometheus and Hephaestus. These two figures will help us to move from the model of professionalization engineering to ingenium. (shrink)

One of the assets of the simulation theory, as defended by Alvin Goldman in many papers and in his book Simulating Minds, is its ability to explain egocentric bias, and more generally the priority of first‐person mindreading over third‐person mindreading (ascription of mental states to other people). This chapter argues, on the contrary, that the simulationist framework enables confusions between self and others that go both ways: taking one's beliefs for the other's beliefs (egocentric bias) and vice versa, taking the (...) other's beliefs for one's beliefs (altercentric bias). It sees how the risk of such confusion may be disadvantageous from an evolutionary perspective, questioning thus the evolutionary plausibility of the simulation theory. Egocentric errors have been taken as evidence of the priority of first‐person mindreading over third‐person mindreading, which seems in line with the simulation theory. Recent findings on altercentric bias have opened a new promising way to investigate the cognitive basis of third‐person mindreading. (shrink)

A priori reflection, common sense and intuition have proved unreliable sources of information about the world outside of us. So the justification for a theory of the categories must derive from the empirical support of the scientific theories whose descriptions it unifies and clarifies. We don’t have reliable information about the de re modal profiles of external things either because the overwhelming proportion of our knowledge of the external world is theoretical—knowledge by description rather than knowledge by acquaintance. This undermines (...) the traditional idea that to be an object of category C is to be an object with such- and-such characteristic possibilities of combination. But this is no loss because de re modal thought lacks utility for creatures like us. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: To Do No Harm: DES and the Dilemmas of Modern Medicine. By Roberta J. Apfel and Susan M. Fisher.

Je reviens dans cet article sur certaines configurations conceptuelles propres à la logique stoïcienne et concernant le traitement stoïcien de la signification qui, comme on le sait, se découple en signifiant et signifié. La question que je pose est la suivante : à quelles certitudes est-on susceptible de parvenir avec les textes dont nous disposons sur la question des rapports entre signification, donc signifiant, σημαῖνον et signifié, σημαινόμενον, et λεκτόν? À l’occasion de cette interrogation, j’en viens à réouvrir l’enquête sur (...) la part éventuelle de modalité associée au λεκτόν et je propose d’analyser la signification stoïcienne tout en prenant en compte des concepts associés ou solidaires, comme les concepts de πρᾶγμα et de πτῶσις. (shrink)

Je reviens dans cet article sur certaines configurations conceptuelles propres à la logique stoïcienne et concernant le traitement stoïcien de la signification qui, comme on le sait, se découple en signifiant et signifié. La question que je pose est la suivante : à quelles certitudes est-on susceptible de parvenir avec les textes dont nous disposons sur la question des rapports entre signification, donc signifiant, σημαῖνον et signifié, σημαινόμενον, et λεκτόν? À l’occasion de cette interrogation, j’en viens à réouvrir l’enquête sur (...) la part éventuelle de modalité associée au λεκτόν et je propose d’analyser la signification stoïcienne tout en prenant en compte des concepts associés ou solidaires, comme les concepts de πρᾶγμα et de πτῶσις. (shrink)